This paper examines Dominican-Haitian contact from an ethno-sociolinguistic, transnational viewpoint. It details the roles of Dominican Spanish, Haitian Kreyòl and Haitianized Spanish in border communities, as related to race, power, status, etc., and explores how these varieties become devices for parleying a fluent but conflictive and equivocal ethnolinguistic identity (inter alia Duany 2010, 2011).